[OpenIndiana-discuss] Intel hardware

[russell]

Hi,

When applying fixes to IllumOS/OpenIndiana to fix the Meltdown 
vulnerability forcing the separation of Kernel Memory from User Memory 
into separate Memory spaces, please make sure that the code detects the 
CPU type. My Dual AMD CPUs are not susceptible the Meltdown so I do not 
want to take the Intel performance hit every time the kernel is accessed.

The Spectre Variant 1 requires software to be run on the host machine 
which can then spy on other applications running on the host. The spying 
application would have to be able to determine the speculative 
instructions executed by another process to access the cached results 
before the cached information is flushed. This variant is mitigated by 
rebuilding your applications to include protection measures this effects 
both AMD and Intel CPUs

The Spectre Variant 2 is an Intel only problem, with only the ARM A75 
core vulnerable and given that has not been released, it makes sense to 
fix the core prior to release so AMD can get some good PR.

Regards

Russell